Cross-Discourse Quoting

It would be useful if I could quote posts from external discourse instances. Something like

[quote=“member, post:3, topic:275, source:meta.discourse.org”]

Where source:meta.discourse.org would provide a similar level of context as internal quotes.

My primary use case is that I’m currently training my Staff to rely on flags instead of manual moderation, and wanted to show them this:

I copied/quoted that from the topic here on meta, and pasted it into my forum, not really thinking about what I was doing. It of course linked to a topic on my forum with the same id, which makes perfect sense, but isn’t what I want.

I could link to the post directly, which works nicely with the onebox, but I really just want to call out the relevant piece.

Aside from staff-training, I also run a few different sites that could benefit from occasionally sharing parts of conversations between them. As an added bonus, this would show users that there’s a larger Discourse world out there by bridging conversations between communities.

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errr isn’t this called “oneboxing an external URL”? I mean, it already works…

https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/how-to-stop-using-tls-sni-01-with-certbot/83210

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Yes that works, but that’s not what I’m describing. That’s a link to the entire post, I’m wondering about the possibility of linking to a quote:

The idea is to load a quote like the one above, so that readers can see a specific part of an external post instead of a link to the full thing, but also with a link back to the source.

It would be quicker than onebox to get specific info to readers, while still letting them get all the context if they want it.


edit: update with example from the link you posted

If you’ve configured Certbot to use a directory other than /etc/letsencrypt, you should use that directory in the commands instead.

The reference post in its entirety would be too much info if I just wanted to quote the piece above, and would cause more friction for the user than is ideal. Focusing on the quote instead is more useful, but now it is somewhat orphaned. Quoting parts of posts between instances would be the best of both features.

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Right but in that case I’d just quote the remote site and provide the URL at the top… like so?


As it says in https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/how-to-stop-using-tls-sni-01-with-certbot/83210

All most users need to do is make sure your Certbot installation is up-to-date and test and configure automatic renewal for the updated version of Certbot. You can find instructions for how to do this at https://certbot.eff.org . You need Certbot version 0.28.0 or newer. You can check which version you have installed by running Certbot with the --version flag.

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The reason oneboxing exists is you can’t assume what other servers are running in terms of version or platform. Not to mention that just because a site is running a particular platform today, that the same will be true tomorrow.

Create a dependency on Discourse now and if anyone ever does move away any platform-specific embedding would break. It’s one of the reasons oneboxing is so damn useful.

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@codinghorror that does work yeah, but it doesn’t have the same slickness as the regular copy/quote feature. Regardless, this isn’t a common enough of a case to be bothersome, but it does have me curious about what is possible. :thinking:

@Stephen I hear ya, that does make sense. Though, would it not be within Discourse’s control to send information about itself to another Discourse instance if it recognized the request? There’s no assumption if a response says: “Hey, I’m a Discourse site too! Here’s the author name and post url to render alongside that quote you requested.”.

That’s a good point though about platform-specific embeds and migration issues. :grimacing:

Perhaps I’m envisioning something too grand here, but a Discourse instance recognizing its siblings across the web seems so cool as a concept, as does users being able to directly quote/converse with each other across communities.

Maybe one day!

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